But it is time to go home. The moon is waning: _suadentque cadentia
sidera somnum_, if only there were any hope of being able to be
persuaded by their reasonable suggestions. But truly the town seems to
afford little hope of it. We make our way out of the crowd with some
difficulty and more patience, and are sensible of a colder nip in the
January night-air as we emerge from it into the neighboring streets.
But even there, though the racket gradually becomes less as we leave
the piazza behind us, there is in every street the braying of those
abominable tin trumpets, and we shall probably turn wearily in our
beds at three or four in the morning and thank Heaven that the Befana
visits us but once a year.

T.A.T.

ERNESTO ROSSI.

The stage of Paris has long been conceded to be the first in the
world. In France the player is not only born--he must be made. Before
the embryo performer achieves the honors of a public debut he has been
trained in the classes of the Conservatoire to declaim the verse of
Racine and to lend due point and piquancy to the prose of Moliere.
He is taught to tread in the well-beaten path of French dramatic art,
fenced in and hedged around with sacred traditions. If he attempts
to embody any one of the characters of the classic drama, every tone,
every gesture, every peculiarity of make-up, every shade and style in
his costume, is prescribed to him beforehand. Originality of treatment
and of conception is above all things to be avoided. So spoke Moliere,
so looked Lekain, so stepped Talma; therefore all the succeeding
generations of players must so speak and look and walk. Let us imagine
the process transferred to our English stage--the shades of Burbage
and Betterton prescribing how Hamlet and Richard III. should be
played--the manners of the seventeenth century forcibly transferred
to our modern stage. The process would be intolerable. Worse still, it
would have the effect on our comparatively undramatic race of crushing
out every spark of originality and of wholly hindering the development
of histrionic talent. With the French such results are happily, to a
certain extent, impossible. There is scarcely any French man or woman
of ordinary intelligence who does not possess sufficient capacity for
acting to be capable of being trained into a very fair performer. The
preponderance of beautiful women on the French stage above those to
be found in other stations of life may be accounted for